1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and device for detecting bus subscribers and solving the problem of being able to address the bus subscribers of a parallel bus in a location-selective manner from a master via the bus, for instance in order to give rise to specific effects at particular locations.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
For this purpose, when the system is started, the master must be informed of the location at which an individually addressable bus subscriber (slave) is connected to the bus. In order to effect this, it is customary to serially loop a so-called token line through all bus subscribers, said token line having an interruption which can be bridged in each bus subscriber. A token signal which is emitted by the master when the system is started passes only to the first interruption point and thus only to the first of the subscribers connected to the bus over the course of the latter. The particular subscriber responds to the signal with the acknowledgement of its identification address and then bridges its interruption, with the result that the next token signal passes to the next bus subscriber and so on until the ID addresses of all bus subscribers have been registered by the master in their physical order along the bus. If the course of the bus is known, particular seats, for example in the passenger cabin of an aircraft, can be individually supplied with light or air, or running light phenomena whose colour and brightness differences can be specifically controlled over the longitudinal extent of the passenger cabin. However, such a token procedure makes it possible to determine only the individual sequence of bus subscribers but not their distance from the master and thus their physical position along the bus. In view of the problem of the amount of space required for the cabling in aircraft, in particular, it is detrimental to have to lay a separate line parallel to the overall extent of the bus only for this initialization when starting the system, which line is then no longer required during operation. The use of the token line results in an additional weight which is not inconsiderable, and, in addition, the amount of space required for two additional connectors for entry and exit of the token line becomes noticeable in each of the bus subscribers.